• Job Type: Officer of Administration
• Regular/Temporary: Regular
• Hours Per Week: 35
• Salary Range: $120,000 - $140,000

Position Summary

The Local News Lab is a product team at the Columbia University Journalism School’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and we are focused on empowering local newsrooms and their communities. With funding from the Knight Foundation, we’re embarking on a new phase of products and services development to help local newsrooms better understand and, through data-driven decision-making, better connect with their communities. Specifically, we’re elevating the lab from an academic research project to an independent, mission-driven business aiming to transform local journalism. Think of it as a startup inside a university — we’re hoping to match the enthusiasm, drive and initiative that goes into creating a new venture.

We are looking for a software engineering technical lead excited about working with local newsrooms, and providing them with sharp, effective tools and critical technical infrastructure. You’ll do this by working closely with our local newsroom partners to help shape our product strategy and drive the development of these products. You’ll bring a mindset of engineering excellence to maintaining existing products and infrastructure and developing new products. We are also building up our own organizational capacity with the goal of becoming a self-sustaining organization. So we’re also looking for someone keen to help build out our team and organization.

This position is dependent on performance as well as the continuation of funding.

Our team is hybrid remote and in-person in New York City. We work out of a beautiful space in historic Pulitzer Hall, at Columbia University, and we believe in the power of in-person connection and collaboration. We’re flexible in what this looks like on a given day or week, but over the long term, we believe it’s essential for our team cohesion to meet in person frequently.

Responsibilities

• Develop and refine engineering strategy, standards, and practices to support the Local News Lab’s products.
• Guide local news organizations in developing their own engineering and data architecture strategies.
• Drive the development and execution of engineering strategy through a combination of strategy development, cross-functional coordination, and individual contributions to product development.
• Design, develop, and deploy backend and frontend components to support local newsrooms’ product, analytics, and editorial needs.
• Build, grow, and mentor an engineering team that balances technical expertise with customer focus.
• Partner closely with product management, business, and partnerships teams to ensure that your roadmap is appropriately prioritized to drive meaningful outcomes.
• Perform other related duties as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree Required.
• 5-7 years of related experience, particularly in software engineering.
• A proven track record of technical leadership of high-performing engineering teams.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to understand technical and non-technical needs of diverse stakeholders.
• A solid understanding of cloud technologies and web analytics, especially Amazon Web Services and Google Analytics.
• A desire to do engineering work in addition to strategic leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building tools for the analysis of quantitative and/or qualitative data.
• Experience in the journalism field, especially reporting and/or editing.

Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran

Columbia University is committed to the hiring of qualified local residents.